Two absentee ballots yield just one vote

Senate race recount tale offers twists, surprises, lessons

The 100-year-old blind nursing home resident from St. Paul had her absentee ballot rejected — but only after her other absentee ballot was accepted.

The multiple mix-up in Barwise's case serves as a cautionary tale — to the media, campaigns and observers — of the limits of public data on rejected absentee ballots in the U.S. Senate race between incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken.

Franken, who trailed by 215 votes in unofficial results, is seeking to have improperly rejected absentee ballots included in the statewide hand recount now under way. Coleman has said the whole issue of figuring out whether absentee ballots were rejected properly is a question for the courts, not the state canvassing board, which is overseeing the recount.

On Wednesday, the five-member board will debate the matter and might make a decision. Statewide, it's not yet known how many ballots were rejected, but in Ramsey County, there are more than 1,000.

The names of voters whose absentee ballots were rejected — meaning never even fed through a voting machine — are public, and the campaigns as well as the media have been poring over recently released lists of those people.

One of them is Lou Barwise. Last week, the Pioneer Press reported how she signed an "X," as state law allows blind people to do, but her ballot was rejected. The reason: "No signature." Her daughter, Mary, was outraged.

All that's true. But there's more to the story.

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Barwise first filled out an absentee ballot in early October, with the help of a professional who assists the blind, Mary Barwise said. That's where she signed an X. After that — but before that ballot was received by the county — on Oct. 17, Ramsey County elections officials visited the St. Anthony Park Home where Barwise resides to help senior citizens fill out absentee ballots.

"I heard about that, but I told her not to fill out another ballot," Mary Barwise said Monday. Apparently, Lou did fill out another ballot. On her application, she signed her actual signature — crooked, squiggly and barely within the appropriate space — but a signature of "Lou Barwise" nonetheless, according to the forms, which Ramsey County officials showed the Pioneer Press on Monday. Sometimes she signs her name, sometimes she makes an X, her daughter said.

That ballot was accepted. On Oct. 27, the ballot with the X arrived in the mail at county elections offices. Elections officials quickly saw there was an actual signature on file for Barwise and rejected the X.

It didn't matter, because on Election Day, Nov. 4, only one of the ballots could have been counted anyway. And one was. A telltale "AB" — for absentee ballot — stamped next to Barwise's name on the official roster at her polling place attests to her successfully cast vote.

"This makes sense now," Mary Barwise said Monday upon learning the whole story from a reporter. "I never knew that she voted at the (nursing) home. She'll be glad to hear this." Lou was unavailable for comment.

Barwise's vote — for the Independence Party's Dean Barkley — mattered not in the Senate race.

But the notion that a person whose name surfaces on a list of rejected absentee ballots might still have had her vote counted raises a red flag.

How many Lou Barwises are out there? No one knows.

The only reason her story was cleared up so quickly — at a time when elections officials are swamped with the recount — was that the phrase "100-year-old blind woman" triggered the memory of the county official who personally accepted her ballot at the nursing home. Over the weekend, the worker sent a note to Elections Supervisor Joe Mansky.

Mansky beamed Monday, after laying out the case that Barwise was not disenfranchised. "I will put the accuracy of our system up against the auto industry and the finance industry," he said.